Biography

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Biography

The music of Vincent Calianno (b. 1979, Buffalo, NY) is inspired by the renegade eloquence and radical temperament of the American vernacular. His works often combine a unique confluence of disparate musical colors, muscular rhythms and complex, virtuosic textures. Calianno's diverse musical corpus includes opera, musicals, large and small ensemble works, electro-acoustica and music for film.

Calianno’s chamber music has been presented across the globe by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Mise-En, the Nouveau Classical Project, Ensemble 39, Tactus, Ossia, Artifact and The New York Miniaturist Ensemble. His orchestral music has been performed by the NYU Symphony, Illinois Symphony Orchestra, and the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra.

Recent commissions include new works for the International Contemporary Ensemble (Notes on The Deliverance Machine) scored for cello trio and electronics, and a new work for ensemble and video for Ensemble Mise-En (How I Fell In Love with W)—an encomium on George W. Bush. Other recent projects include Sororatorio—a setting of the rather infamous 2013 ‘deranged sorority girl’ email/meme. Also in 2016, his orchestra piece The Facts and Dreams of the World According to Michael Jackson was selected as the winner of the 2016 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize.

In 2017, Calianno looks forward to a new commissions by the Iowa State Symphony Orchestra (missed connections despite), a new work for string quartet, electronics and video for the San-Francisco based Thalea String Quartet (A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat), and a new work for flute and electronics for Yamaha artist Jenny Shin.

In addition to concert music, Calianno is an active composer for short and feature length films, commercials and multimedia projects. His interest in silent cinema has led him to compose scores for both classic and recent silent films. His score for Carl Dreyer’s 1927 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc for viola and electronics has been performed live with the film throughout the U.S. and Canada including a portrait concert in 2009 at Le Poisson Rouge in New York.

Calianno holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Eastman School of Music, the University of Illinois and New York University. His principal teachers have included John Luther Adams, Lewis Nielson, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Zack Browning, Mark Suozzo and Livingston Gearhart.

More Information is available at www.droplid.com

[current as of October 2017]

Artist Statement

Artist Statement

I believe in actually creating new music, not lumping together an array of extended techniques and passé effects and calling it new music;

I believe in creating art that experiments and investigates with acumen and with naïveté; in creating art that, above all things, aspires to transcend and illuminate – art where the spirit works with the hand, not against it;

In creating music that is free from the elitist, inaccessible, self-absorbed and self-righteous attitude of certain sects of American new music composers and their parasites, whose crabby, cliché-ridden, irrelevant and solipsistic music touches no hearts and inspires no souls.

I believe that my music should find an aesthetic that balances my conservatory upbringings with my American ‘maverick’ sensibilities;

I believe in creating art that is at once rich with musical metaphor and allusion but also accesses fresh and truly current trends in the visual and all other aural arts;

In creating art that is vernacular, polystylistic, self-referential and ironic which can be accessible to the listener and performer without feeling that the music is plastic or an iconic bastard;

In creating art that has a luminous, attractive and comprehensible surface but also has a stable, rich and compositional core;

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS in Composition-Theory, 2012University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Urbana, Illinois